24.500/Phil253 topics in philosophy of mind/perceptual
experience
session 11
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Cite as: Alex Byrne, course materials for 24.500 Topics in the Philosophy of Mind: Perceptual Experience, Spring 2007. MIT
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plan
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no class next week
Chomsky et al. @ Harvard @ 4pm
Schwitzgebel on Titchener
Schwitzgebel on shoes
Image removed due to copyright restrictions.
Photograph of Schwitzgebel.
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Introspection Titchener characterizes as the
observation of conscious processes, or the
attention to and noting of such processes…I
myself am drawn to a similar view of
introspection, according to which it is a
species of attention to conscious experience
(ITAD, 59)
• restricted to conscious experience (beliefs
etc. are introspectible in the general sense)
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• http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/Schwitz
Papers/TitchDemo030417.htm
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And, in general, that which makes the sensation of blue a mental fact
seems to escape us: it seems, if I may use a metaphor, to be
transparent—we look through it and see nothing but the blue; we
may be convinced that there is something but what it is no
philosopher, I think, has yet clearly recognised. (Moore, ‘The
Refutation of Idealism’)
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the moment we try to fix our attention upon consciousness and to
see what, distinctly, it is, it seems to vanish: it seems as if we had
before us a mere emptiness. When we try to introspect the
sensation of blue, all we can see is the blue: the other element is
as if it were diaphanous.
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Cite as: Alex Byrne, course materials for 24.500 Topics in the Philosophy of Mind: Perceptual Experience, Spring 2007. MIT
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Intuitively, you are directly aware of blueness and
squareness as…features of an external surface. Now
shift your gaze inward and try to become aware of
your experience itself, inside you, apart from its
objects. Try to focus your attention on some intrinsic
feature of the experience that distinguishes it from
other experiences, something other than what it is an
experience of. The task seems impossible: one’s
awareness seems always to slip through the
experience to blueness and squareness, as
instantiated together in an external object. In turning
one’s mind inward to attend to the experience, one
seems to end up concentrating on what is outside
again, on external features or properties. (Tye, Ten
Problems…)
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Suppose you are facing a white wall, on which you see a bright Figure by MIT OCW.
red, round patch of paint. Suppose you are attending closely to
the color and shape of the patch as well as the background.
Now turn your attention from what you see out there in the world
before you to your visual experience. Focus upon your
awareness of the patch as opposed to the patch of which you
are aware. Do you find yourself suddenly acquainted with new
qualities, qualities that are intrinsic to your visual experience in
the way that redness and roundness are qualities intrinsic to the
patch of paint? According to some philosophers, the answer to
this question is a resounding ‘No’. As you look at the patch, you
are aware of certain features out there in the world. When you
turn your attention inwards to your experience of those features,
you are aware that you are having an experience of a certain
sort but you aware of the very same features; no new features of
your experience are revealed. In this way, your visual
experience is transparent or diaphanous. (Tye, Qualia, SEP)
Cite as: Alex Byrne, course materials for 24.500 Topics in the Philosophy of Mind: Perceptual Experience, Spring 2007. MIT
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Eloise is aware of the tree as a tree that she is now
seeing. So, we can suppose she is aware of some
features of her current visual experience. In
particular, she is aware that her visual experience
has the feature of being an experience of seeing a
tree. That is to be aware of an intentional feature of
her experience; she is aware that her experience has
a certain content. On the other hand, I want to argue
that she is not aware of those intrinsic features of her
experience by virtue of which it has that content.
(Harman, ‘The intrinsic quality of experience’)
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Cite as: Alex Byrne, course materials for 24.500 Topics in the Philosophy of Mind: Perceptual Experience, Spring 2007. MIT
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some ‘transparency’ theses
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1. one cannot attend to (or be aware of) one’s
(current, visual) experience
• setting aside brain scanners etc.
2. one cannot attend to (or be aware of)
‘intrinsic features’ of one’s experience
3. one can only know about
intentional/representational features of one’s
experience, not its intrinsic features
• (3) plausibly implies (2) but not conversely
• ‘transparency’ is (something along the
lines of) 1&2&3
Cite as: Alex Byrne, course materials for 24.500 Topics in the Philosophy of Mind: Perceptual Experience, Spring 2007. MIT
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Figure by MIT OCW.
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it seems to be assumed that experiences are
particulars (specifically events), otherwise talk of
‘intrinsic features’ makes little sense
but then (3) is puzzling, because it seems to imply
that we can’t even know that our experience has
temporal properties (lasts for more than 5 seconds,
say)
and if we can’t, why think we have experiences at
all?
on the other hand, if we can, why are other[?]
‘intrinsic features’ off limits?
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Figure by MIT OCW.
• n.b. don’t confuse this sense of ‘transparency’
with Moran’s (no doubt related) sense:
With respect to the attitude of belief, the claim
of transparency tells us that the first-person
question “Do I believe P?” is “transparent” to,
answered in the same way as, the outwarddirected question as to the truth of P itself.
(Moran, Authority and Estrangement)
Cite as: Alex Byrne, course materials for 24.500 Topics in the Philosophy of Mind: Perceptual Experience, Spring 2007. MIT
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Figure by MIT OCW.
• modulo unclarities in the statement of
transparency, Titchener’s methods seem to
illustrate it
• ‘introspective psychology’ is (ironically) not
interestingly introspective
• the ‘introspectors’ are attending to (apparent)
external stimuli and their (apparent)
properties
• the ‘introspective’ training is extrospective
training
Cite as: Alex Byrne, course materials for 24.500 Topics in the Philosophy of Mind: Perceptual Experience, Spring 2007. MIT
OpenCourseWare (http://ocw.mit.edu/), Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Downloaded on [DD Month YYYY].
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Let’s back up a bit, though, and ask: Are
students in this experiment really
introspecting? In my experience, attempting
to discern a combination tone feels no
different from attempting to discern a faint
tone of the ordinary sort. It feels just like
listening for sounds in the external
environment. One could presumably develop
substantial expertise in discerning
combination tones without ever taking oneself
to be introspectively reporting one’s own
mental states. (64)
Cite as: Alex Byrne, course materials for 24.500 Topics in the Philosophy of Mind: Perceptual Experience, Spring 2007. MIT
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One might hope to defend the view that the training is
nonetheless introspective on the grounds that
combination tones, being (in general opinion) an
artifact of the ear, do not exist in the world in the
same way that ordinary tones do, and thus that in
attending to them one cannot be attending to the
outside world. Since it sounds odd to say that one is
attending to one’s ear, it is easy to suppose that one
must be attending to some part of one’s experience,
that is to say, introspecting. However, this argument
would prove too much. If every sensory or perceptual
feature that does not exist outside the observer is
introspectively discovered, then many illusions are
discoverable only by introspection. (64-5)
Cite as: Alex Byrne, course materials for 24.500 Topics in the Philosophy of Mind: Perceptual Experience, Spring 2007. MIT
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• why does the argument ‘prove too much’?
• the color adaptation example is no more
convincing as a case of non-introspective
attention than the original tone example
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Figure by MIT OCW.
Auditory experience is far too complex for ordinary
people to parse. Thus, a new student entering
Titchener’s laboratory, asked to describe her auditory
experience with care and in detail, would be baffled.
To provide introspective reports of any value, she
needs concepts and a vocabulary, a sense of what to
look for, and practice in discerning these aspects of
her experience as it occurs. Training in the
recognition of combination tones is thus introspective
training not because reporting such tones is
necessarily an introspective act but because for the
person antecedently interested in introspectively
attending to her own auditory experience, the training
provides a way of identifying and labelling one aspect
of it. (65)
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• how does that address the worry, which was
that ‘introspective training’ does not involve
‘attention to conscious experience’?
• ES seems to concede this point
• after the training, someone who is
‘antecedently interested in introspectively
attending to her own auditory experience’ will
have some new ‘concepts and a vocabulary’
(n.b. pertaining to sounds, not to
‘experiences’), but how does that help?
Cite as: Alex Byrne, course materials for 24.500 Topics in the Philosophy of Mind: Perceptual Experience, Spring 2007. MIT
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Figure by MIT OCW.
• in any case, attention to external stimuli (and
so ‘introspective training’) does change the
appearance of those stimuli
• it therefore does not reveal what one’s
‘experience’ was like all along
• Carrasco et al., Attention alters appearance,
Nature Neuroscience 2004
• mentioned by Block last week
Cite as: Alex Byrne, course materials for 24.500 Topics in the Philosophy of Mind: Perceptual Experience, Spring 2007. MIT
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Figure by MIT OCW.
Neutral cue
Fixation
500 ms
Peripheral cue
Cue
67 ms
Time
ISI
53 ms
Stimuli
40 ms
Response
1,000 ms
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Cite as: Alex Byrne, course materials for 24.500 Topics in the Philosophy of Mind: Perceptual Experience, Spring 2007. MIT
OpenCourseWare (http://ocw.mit.edu/), Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Downloaded on [DD Month YYYY].
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Figure by MIT OCW.
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Cite as: Alex Byrne, course materials for 24.500 Topics in the Philosophy of Mind: Perceptual Experience, Spring 2007. MIT
OpenCourseWare (http://ocw.mit.edu/), Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Downloaded on [DD Month YYYY].
24.500/Phil253 S07
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• http://viscog.beckman.uiuc.edu/djs_lab/demo
s.html
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Cite as: Alex Byrne, course materials for 24.500 Topics in the Philosophy of Mind: Perceptual Experience, Spring 2007. MIT
OpenCourseWare (http://ocw.mit.edu/), Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Downloaded on [DD Month YYYY].
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